Thursday, August 6, 2015

FOODFIC: Please Welcome Amelia Gormley, Author of STRAIN

Scavenging in the
Post-Apocalyptic World

The
worst of the plague has passed. The vast majority of the world’s population is
dead. Sure, there are still cannibalistic zombie-like creatures roaming around,
but for the most part it’s safe to venture out of seclusion and thank God it
is, because your carefully hoarded supplies are almost exhausted and you’re in
real danger of starving to death.

But
that’s okay, because assuming other survivors haven’t gotten to them first,
grocery store shelves are loaded with non-perishables that no one is going to
need. So you arm yourself with a small arsenal and make your way to the nearest
supermarket. So far, so good. No plague victims to infect you. No cannibals to
eat you. And you’ve managed to evade the other survivors who would shoot you
just on the off chance that you were after their
supplies.

The
store is dark, of course; the grid collapsed months ago when all the people
keeping it up and running died. But you have flashlights and batteries. The
windows and doors are intact, so it hasn’t already been looted. So you break in
and slip inside.

And
that’s when the smell hits you.

All that
meat. All that fish. All that dairy and produce. All without refrigeration for
the last several months. The milk jugs have exploded because the milk inside
has fermented. Flies are all over; the rotten meat in the butcher’s counter
display is infested with maggots. Mealmoths flutter everywhere; all the flour
and oatmeal in the bulk bins and grains that weren’t in airtight containers are
full of weevils.

Cans and
some of the boxes are intact, but first you need to brave the rats you hear
scurrying around in the dark. And you don’t have much time to do it, because
sooner or later those cannibals are going to find you. Better hurry.

But let’s
say your hideout was rural. Plenty of farmland, but protein might be a problem.
But hey, cows and goats survived the plague too, and there are deer to hunt,
right?

Terrific.
Do you know how to butcher the carcass without nicking the intestines and tainting
the meat? Do you know how to preserve the meat you managed to butcher, or will
most of it rot before you have a chance to eat it?

Or maybe
it’s ten years after the plague, and you’ve had to leave your refuge and all
your supplies behind. Only now the non-perishables in the grocery store (the
ones that survived the rats and looters) have, well, perished.

These
are the sorts of scenarios I had to consider when writing my post-apocalyptic
novel Strain and its prequel, Juggernaut and their upcoming sequel, Bane (all available from Riptide
Publishing.) It’s easy to imagine that there will be plenty of non-perishable
food around in the event of the end of the world, but the logistics of survival
are a lot more complex than one might imagine.

Juggernaut takes place immediately before and after the
world-ending plague, while Strain is
set ten years later. For Strain and Bane, I had to imagine a world in which
all the grocery stores had already been ransacked, and most clusters of
survivors have already begun to relearn farming and herding livestock.
Preserved meats—salted, smoked, jerky and so forth—would be common. For those
who didn’t have supplies and know-how to preserve fruits and vegetables,
produce would largely be a treat for the warmer months. This is why, sometime
around the last major ice age, human beings evolved to be primarily carnivores.

Yes, you
read that right; the claim that humans evolved as omnivores is actually quite
misleading. We have the ability to eat vegetation and we require certain nutrients
that are mainly found in fruits (such as vitamin C, lest we develop scurvy),
but our digestive systems are actually far more similar to carnivorous animals
than to omnivores. So in Strain,
there’s more of an emphasis placed on seeing the characters eating fresh and
preserved meats.

For Juggernaut, the logistics were quite a
bit more complicated. I was dealing with characters who were still immediately accustomed
to having endless quantities of food available to them with just a quick trip
to the market. They wouldn’t know or have had time to relearn anything about
farming or animal husbandry. Luckily the libraries will likely have gone
unlooted and there will be books to read to learn about the subject. It will
just take time.

But, for
the most part, farming is a little more intuitive, and easier to accomplish for
people who are still largely keeping themselves sequestered to avoid contagion.
They wouldn’t dare venture out to hunt or try to round up the livestock that
had managed to survive the neglect of not being fed and cared for by humans who
had died. The survivors would probably focus most of their animal husbandry
attempts on chickens, who are portable enough to make the journey to safety
with the people in question. Their eggs could be a primary source of fat and
protein and they’re small enough to maintain in quarantine pens and small
enclaves of survivors.

Alas,
gourmet cooking is likely to be an art form that will likely die out with most
of the population. Fare will be simple and straightforward. Surviving takes
enough effort without diverting energy to producing complex or time-consuming
meals, especially since most cooking is going to happen over open fires. The
electric grid, we’ve already established, has collapsed, and natural gas pipelines
will only last as long as there are people to maintain them as well. Once they
lose pressure, that’s gone too.

The same
applies to the water supply. The only places that will have running water or
indoor plumbing are places that have windmills to power pumps that will
pressurizes pipes from in-ground wells. The digging of latrines will have to be
strategic and most people used to indoor plumbing won’t realize that. We can
probably anticipate a “second plague” of people dying from problems with
sanitation and inadequate/compromised food supplies.

It’s
almost enough to make one want to start stockpiling supplies and become a
survivalist, isn’t it?